Ed: If you want to see this column, and future columns, distributed it is on you to post the link to this column around on social media. So-called "free speech" X has handed me a 7 day suspension for telling the AP to stick their recommendation to get more covid jabs in their own butts, deeming that "violent speech." This is what "AI" is capable of today -- no more "intelligent" than a two year old, and its no better at driving a car than that either, but this is the world we live in where someone's computer will blackball you with no human review of any sort and no right of appeal (incidentally, you might think about that before riding in or owning a car with that garbage in it as yes, that data IS SOLD to others who will fuck you in the ass with it), so if you want to see these ideas propagated, its on you. I will be looking at the linkbacks which will tell me whether its worth continuing to write these columns from organic activity, that is people like you, spreading them around. That which nobody reads there is no reason to write and publish -- I can go ski and drink beer instead this winter, should that be the decision of the polity at large.
Medicine is no longer "medicine"; it has been irredeemably corrupted in the United States.
Only severing, with prejudice, the source of that corruption can resolve this.
Witness this article from 2015:
“A lot of what is published is incorrect.” I’m not allowed to say who made this remark because we were asked to observe Chatham House rules. We were also asked not to take photographs of slides. Those who worked for government agencies pleaded that their comments especially remain unquoted, since the forthcoming UK election meant they were living in “purdah”—a chilling state where severe restrictions on freedom of speech are placed on anyone on the government’s payroll. Why the paranoid concern for secrecy and non-attribution? Because this symposium—on the reproducibility and reliability of biomedical research, held at the Wellcome Trust in London last week—touched on one of the most sensitive issues in science today: the idea that something has gone fundamentally wrong with one of our greatest human creations.
"Something"?
Let's talk about the basic issue: Science is not a result or a statement of fact.
It is a process whereby one first begins with a hypothesis (that is, a belief or theory), one designs one or more experiments, hopefully to try to disprove said theory although attempting to prove it is also acceptable, data is collected and analyzed and then results reported publicly.
You might think that is where it ends. You're wrong.
Replication by disinterested and even hostile parties is next. The first experiment means literally nothing from a scientific point of view because there's no proof you didn't tamper with it. If the hypothesis is proved its even worse if you were the one who stood to benefit from that. That is, human corruption has to be filtered and the only way to do that is to have disinterested or even hostile parties confirm what you found by repeated running of, and examination of, your experiment.
We don't do this anymore when it comes to "medicine" and we don't even bother attempting it when it comes to other things such as "climate."
As a result trillions is stolen and people die.
Nobody cares about the dying part either -- only the money part.
At the core of this corruption is the money motive and over 120 years ago Congress recognized that men and women would corrupt the various areas of commerce by all sorts of means, every one of them foul, and by doing so ultimately destroy what had driven an incredible burst of progress in this nation called America. They recognized that the patent and similar laws, passed to incentivize inventing things, could be perverted if you had a way to choke supply and demand so that those "protected" things were perversely required and others deliberately downplayed or overlooked -- or worse, outright prohibited.
They passed 15 USC Chapter 1; the Sherman Act was first, quickly evaded and Clayton followed to make clear that this was not a paper tiger and a line of BS; it was a deadly serious felony for which you'd go to prison.
Robinson-Patman followed stating that in the context of goods buyers of like kind and quantity could not be discriminated against.
These laws have been on the books for over a century.
Virtually every single medical office, every pharmacy, every pharmacist, dentist, hospital and physician violates them every day.
They're 10 year federal felonies, not a jaywalking ticket.
Simply put its illegal to charge different people different amounts of money for the same thing -- like kind and quantity. As soon as you collude in an attempt to prevent, irrespective of the means, competition on price you've broken the law. If you obscure the price of a procedure or thing so that it is effectively impossible for a consumer of that thing to shop before purchase, you tie sales together so I have to take (and pay for) something I do not want to get something I do want, or you charge me $2 for something you give to someone else for $1 where we both wanted to buy the same thing under the same set of circumstances you have broken the law; you are a felon.
More than forty years ago the Supreme Court ruled (in Royal Drug) that insurance companies are not allowed to "negotiate price" on a differential basis and that McCarran-Ferguson, another law exempting insurance companies from some aspects of anti-trust, did not apply because "purchasing agreements with vendors of a thing" is not the business of insurance. It is, in fact, nothing more than attempting to negotiate a volume transaction. That decision was confirmed a few years later in Maricopa County when the medical providers tried once again to circumvent 15 USC claiming that there was some special aspect of it when an insurance company was involved. They lost the second time as well.
The only way to fix this, short of simply shooting everyone who is financially raping the American public to the tune of trillions a year via these felonious schemes that twice have been ruled illegal at the Supreme Court and which call for 10 years in the federal slammer for each person who commits said offense is to mandate (and start throwing people in jail if they won't do it) that all persons must be charged the same price for the same thing consumed by a single person in the medical and pharmaceutical industry and "insurance" must be prohibited from coupling paying, provision of service and similar.
This is one of the core holdings in the plan I have promoted for over a decade.
Insurance companies can legally set a "payment rate" of $x for some procedure but they can't condition that on you going to a specific provider as that is an illegal restraint of trade and monopolist practice; if the payout rate for an appendectomy is $5,000 then it has to be no matter where you have it done because you are the principal -- not the insurance company. Likewise the hospital has to publish each and every thing in a way that the ultimate consumer which is you, not an insurance company, can determine the cost of a procedure with certainty before you obtain it. Charging someone for a thing they did not agree to is void under long-standing consumer protection laws.
Further 15 USC Ch 1 absolutely bans the payment of "incentives" (bribes) by insurance companies to physicians or hospitals on various metrics -- for example, payment for vaccination rates. That amounts to an illegal force-tied sale that is shoved down the customer's (patient's) throat under penalty of being fired, and a thing they may not want and once again is not "the business of insurance"; and again the Supremes so-ruled in Royal Drug. This practice, which is near-universal and was extended to covid shots, is illegal and it is a criminal felony carrying 10 years in prison for not just the insurance company executives that put it in place but also every individual physician who complies with and benefits from it.
Medicine has one very specific circumstance that doesn't arise in general with other services: You might be flat on your back and unable to shop or negotiate. In every other line of work abusing a person of diminished capacity is a further felony -- in medicine its how money is made. This must change and such an offense must be dealt with through extreme prejudice, including permanent license revocations, prison sentences and forced disgorgement of all assets obtained by such a practice.
This isn't a "radical proposal"; in fact all of it was mandated by the Supreme Court more than forty years ago.
If our government will not enforce the law and by deliberately refusing screws the American people out of trillions of dollars per year there is absolutely no reason for the American people to peacefully permit that to continue for even a single day.
Actuaries compute the value of human lives every day; the medical and "health insurance" system violates those limits on a wild-eyed basis every single hour and by doing so commits offenses sufficient to call for the imposition of the death penalty.
We cannot fix a system that has designed itself to be corrupt other than by removing those capacities. Those who have and are profiting from this will, of course, resist such a change and have for decades.
We're no longer in a position to ignore this problem as, at the present time, the entire budget deficit and thus the entire inflationary problem in the United States is driven by CMS, which is in fact Medicare and Medicaid, and further medicine generally has expanded from about one dollar in 20 to one dollar in five over the last several decades, with virtually all of that expansion being stolen. We are talking about six trillion dollars a year in the United States alone and if there is a monetary theft that is worthy of forcing to stop no matter how or what people must to put a stop to it -- this is it.
This is Trump's first and most-important job because the entire Federal Budget Deficit lies here, there is no other way to fix it than to dismantle the medical monopolies and he can do it without a single new law being passed by prosecuting every single hospital and pharma company that prices on any sort of differential basis and arresting, charging everyone involved with a 10 year in the prison felony, who does not immediately implement 100% level pricing all disclosed up front and with every link to so-called "insurance" severed.
THIS IS THE PATH OUT OF THE MELTDOWN and note the date it was written. No, we cannot avoid the hit to GDP and unemployment in the short term that fixing this will cause. It will come but we can avoid the destruction of the medical system entirely and the destruction of the federal government's funding capacity.
IT MUST BE DONE ON TRUMP'S FIRST DAY IN OFFICE AND NOTE THAT NOT ONE NEW LAW IS REQUIRED AND THUS CONGRESS IS NOT ONLY NOT REQUIRED TO DO ANYTHING THEY CAN'T STOP IT EITHER.